Impellitteri is not a band I usually check for. Always thought the band was generic shred metal for the most part. However, I noticed The Nature of the Beast was making the round on multiple ‘best of 2018’ lists, so I decided to put it on as background noise to hear what the big deal is.

Well, it’s better than I expected and by listening to it I’ve discovered one of my favorite songs of the year– “Phantom of the Opera”. It’s a fantastic shred metal version of the Andrew Lloyd Weber song that comes from the musical of the same name. I’ve always loved that song and this version here is mind-blowing. Rob Rock’s vocals and Chris Impellitteri’s shredding on this track are mind-blowing. I can’t stop playing this song. I immediately played this version again (and again and again…) after hearing it for the first time.

Sadly, there is nothing else on this album that matches the intensity of “Phantom of the Opera”, but there are still a handful of good tracks. “Kill the Beast” has a bit of an Iron Maiden vibe while “Run For Your Life” (sadly not a cover of Riot song)

Highlights: “Kill the Beast”, “Run For Your Life”, “The Phantom of the Opera”

Stephen Pearcy – View to a Thrill2018, Frontiers Records

Despite (or maybe because of) the drama that constantly surrounds Ratt, Stephen Pearcy has been fairly active as a solo act since the late ’90s. He can usually be found on the road with his own solo band. Every now and then, he’ll release an album. I’m usually a bit cautious of new Pearcy music because I still remember the low-grade industrial/alternative metal albums he released in the early & mid-2000s as well as the steady reissues/re-recordings of Mickey Ratt/Ratt demos & tunes.

View to a Thrill comes just two years after the enjoyable Smash, and stylistically it follows in the same vein of melodic sleazy hard rock you’d expect from the lead singer of Ratt. It probably helps that both View to a Thrill and Smash were released by Frontiers Records. Probably a record deal that included an agreed upon sound & style from Pearcy.

“Violator” and “From the Inside” do have a more modern hard rock/metal sound to them, but they aren’t bad and don’t really entirely out of place. The rest of the album is full of Ratt/Arcade-worthy tracks such as “U Only Live Twice”, “Not Killin’ Me” (my favorite track), “Dangerous Thing”, and “I’m a Ratt” (duh).

While it would great to hear some new Ratt tunes (and PLEASE ge DeMartini back!), View to a Thrill is a good holdover for Ratt fans. I feel like Smash kind of went under the radar, so I have no doubts that this album will as well, but it’s definitely worth a listen.

Highlights: “U Only Live Twice”, “Not Killin’ Me”

Sacred Leather – Ultimate Force2018, Cruz del Sur Music

Never heard of these guys before but I’m glad I decided to give this album a chance. Indianapolis, Indiana-based Sacred Leather is pure ’80s power metal complete with high pitch soaring vocals. The band has been around for a handful of years with Ultimate Force being their first full studio release. Most of the band members all have experience in previous metal bands that primarily played doom, black, sludge, death or thrash variations. It appears this is the first time any of them have attempted to go the traditional ’80s power metal route. Boy, have they knocked it out of the park!

My only complaint would be the mix. Vocalist Dee Wrathchild (AKA – Dustin Boltjes, ex-Skeletonwitch drummer) does a great group but his vocals sound a bit muddy and pushed too far back.

A lot of modern bands that try to go the traditional heavy metal route usually come across as soulless and generic but that’s not the case on Ultimate Force. Despite having a laugh with their stage names (Magnus LeGrand, Jailhouse, JJ Highway, Caroloff Blitz, Dee Wrathchild), these guys have legit songwriting skills. Great riffs and melodies and the nine minute closing track “The Lost Destructor / Priest of the Undoer” is an epic that features a late ’80s Metallica-quality solo in its last quarter.

1. The Dirt (Est. 1981)
2. Red Hot
3. On with the Show
4. Live Wire
5. Merry-Go-Round
6. Take Me to the Top
7. Piece of Your Action
8. Shout at the Devil
9. Looks That Kill
10. Too Young to Fall in Love
11. Home Sweet Home
12. Girls, Girls, Girls
13. Same Ol’ Situation (S.O.S.)
14. Kickstart My Heart
15. Dr. Feelgood
16. Ride with the Devil
17. Crash and Burn
18. Like a Virgin

Serving as a companion to the Motley Crue Netflix biopic of the same name, The Dirt is less about being a “best of” career retrospective and more about representing the band’s hedonistic glory days. Of course, you could argue that the majority of Motley’s best work came from those days and they certainly sold the most records then, but the lack of “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” alone makes me believe they weren’t really thinking “greatest hits” or “best of” when choosing tracks for this compilation. I’ll assume most, if not all, of these tracks appear in the movie as I haven’t seen it yet.

It’s the four new tracks that I am interested in, otherwise this would be another compilation I’d ignore.

“The Dirt (Est. 1981)” is a fairly average and forgettable song that sounds like something that was left on the cutting room floor during the Saints of Los Angeles sessions. There’s even a misguided appearance from rapper Machine Gun Kelly that I guess was too good to pass up since Kelly was cast as Tommy Lee in the movie. Seriously wtf… your audience is middle-aged men who want to relive their youth, not twenty-somethings who listen to rap.

A slight improvement is “Ride With the Devil”. A bit of a Sixx:A.M. vibe here.

“Crash and Burn” is easily the best song of the new tracks, and has that modern Crue sound that fits in with “Sick Love Song”, Saints of Los Angeles, and 2012’s “Sex” & 2015’s “All Bad Things” singles. I actually like this song a lot. It’s interesting that for a movie based on a book that reveled so much in the band’s 80s heyday that the band didn’t even try to recapture that sound on the new releases.

Well, here we are. The fourth new track. “Like a Virgin” is indeed a cover of the Madonna song. Fairly pointless. These new songs may be the last we ever hear from Motley Crue so I would’ve preferred another original track rather than a cover of an ’80s pop song. And I’m not one of those Vince Neil haters (I recognize he’s always had limitations as a singer and I think he’s always sounded fine at the concerts I’ve been to), but this song is a not a good fit for him. He seems to be struggling here.

Given that this soundtrack is meant to represent the band’s life from 1981’s Too Fast for Love to 1989’s Dr. Feelgood only, I think album does a fine job showing that. The new tracks “Ride With the Devil” and “Crash and Burn” are good listens, but anyone who hasn’t enjoyed Motley post-Dr. Feelgood probably won’t enjoy them because they aren’t trying to fit in stylistically with the band’s ’80s material.

In Whitesnake’s early days, they had some really cool album covers. Both the UK and US versions of Trouble were pretty cool. The UK version (pictured) looks like a rub-on tattoo you’d get out of a 50 cent vending machine, and the ’80s kid in me appreciates that. Lovehunter was a sexy cover depicting a naked woman wrapped up by/riding a giant snake. Surely an image worthy of being airbrushed onto the side of a van! Come An’ Get It is also an interesting airbrushed piece of art featuring a green snake all wrapped up inside an apple just waiting to strike out with its poisonous fangs. Slide It In has the band returning to the imagery of a woman’s assets by having a snake sliding down into a woman’s cleavage. Even the logo that all of these albums share is pretty cool as it’s just one extremely long snake spelling out “Whitesnake”.

Whitesnake (1987)

That brings us to the band’s self-titled album from 1987 (which for some reason was actually titled 1987 for European and the Australian markets). A new logo and a weathered emblem with the initials “WS” on what I have always assumed to be a cracked wall, but it could just as easily be a tombstone or sidewalk I suppose! It’s a good album cover in its own right. This era was a turning point for when Coverdale got more serious about the band having a modern commercial appeal and it shows here. The album cover is not only classic, but classy. It’s definitely one of the memorable album covers from the 1980s in my opinion.

After leaving L.A. Guns in 2002, Tracii Guns returned with his own version of L.A. Guns in 2006. At the same time, the original L.A. Guns (led by Phil Lewis & drummer Steve Riley) continued on. Both versions of the band fell apart by 2016, which led to Phil Lewis & Tracii Guns reuniting with a new incarnation on the band. Oddly, there hasn’t been a peep from the exiled Steve Riley, who was a part of the band’s “classic” line-up and served as drummer from 1987-1992 & 1994-2016.

Time will tell if Riley will pop up with his own version of band (he co-owns the name with Tracii last I heard). I’m not sure why he wasn’t a part of this Phil & Tracii reunion, but he should’ve been given he’s been the most consistent member of the group over the decades.

The first thing that struck me on this album was the mix of the album. I had just finished listening to a previous album, and when I started to play this one, I had to to turn the volume up considerably. Not sure what’s going on there as Frontiers releases generally sound great, but the volume and mix is off with this one. Minor complaint, but one I felt worth mentioning.

The music itself is certainly L.A. Guns. While the band has been kind of a joke over the last 15 years or so with all of the drama, two versions of the band and constantly rotating members, at the core you have a great vocalist with Phil Lewis and Tracii Guns is still a shredder who can write some great riffs. He’s certainly one of the best guitarists to come out of the hair metal scene and probably never got his due as a guitar legend.

The Missing Peace is a return to form for the band. The last handful of Lewis/Riley L.A. Guns albums were well-received, but Tracii really puts the Guns back in Guns. Most of this album sounds like classic L.A. Guns. Riffs, sleaze, Phil Lewis wailing… this album makes you think of some bar down on the Sunset Strip. If you listened to 1989’s Cocked & Loaded, and then popped in The Missing Peace, you’d hear a band that hasn’t really lost a step. The songwriting on this album is a bit more mature, but the sound is still very similar.

The band still writes a killer ballad. While not a ripoff, “Christine” might as well have been called “The Ballad of Christine”, as it seems very much an homage to “The Ballad of Jayne” from the band’s second album. “Gave It All Away” is an epic mid-tempo metallic closing number. Not the fastest song the band has ever done, but maybe their most heavy metal moment?

The first five tracks of the album are one fantastic song after another, where again Tracii Gunns proves he is a riff-master and the heart & soul of the band. And there’s no one else I’d rather hear singing over those riffs than Phil Lewis. It is magic when these two create music together. Hopefully they’ll actually stick together this time around.

The Missing Peace (which I’ve always assumed was reference to the band’s rocky history and the fact that the two main members of the group haven’t worked together in 15+ years) is a highlight album for 2017. It fits in with their old material quite well and is a much more consistent album than the recent albums that didn’t feature Tracii Gunns (Tales from the Strip and Hollywood Forever).

Highlights: “It’s All the Same to Me”, “Speed”, “A Drop of Bleach”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Christine”, “Gave It All Away”

17 years after the release of their previous album, American Blitzkreig,and after years of performing live shows on and off, Babylon A.D. finally got themselves back into the studio to record their fourth album, Revelation Highway. The only is mostly made up of new material (more on that later) and it’s pretty cool they were able to score Frontiers Records as a label for this release.

For fans of the band’s 1989 self-titled debut and 1992’s Nothing Sacred, Revelation Highway will sound like a natural follow-up to those releases. You honestly wouldn’t know so many years have passed between releases. Vocalist Derek Davis still sounds the same and the band is still playing in that melodic hard rock style that is reminiscent of late ’80s/early ’90s “hair bands”, and I’m not knocking them for that. In short, this sounds like Babylon A.D.

And part of the reason for that is because four of these tracks (“Tears”, “She Likes to Give It”, “Last Time for Love”, and “I’m Not Good For You”) were demoed between 1986 and 1988, before the band’s debut album from Arista Records. Those song were reworked and re-recorded for this new release, so there is some late ’80s authenticity going on here. The rest of the track are brand new and all ten tracks fit in together. It’s not as if the new stuff doesn’t compare to the four songs that were written back in the day. If you didn’t already know which sounds were written when, you’d never know. It all sounds like Babylon A.D.

From the older material, “Tears” and “She Like to Give It” are both exceptional while “Crash and Burn” and “Rags to Riches” are my favorites of the new songs. Revelation Highway is a worthy addition to the band’s catalog.

This veteran hard rock band from Sweden is firmly in their “vintage heavy rock” phase, something they started with their previous release (War of Kings). I’m sure it helps that producer Dave Cobb has been sitting in the studio for both War of Kings and Walk the Earth and gets a co-writer credit on 9 of the 10 tracks here. Cobb has worked with Rival Sons and All Them Witches, both of which are bands that have a 1970s heavy rock influence.

It’s cool to see this band go from heavy metal to glam metal/AOR to now having a vintage 1970’s bluesy hard rock sound. Just like War of Kings, there’s plenty here for fans of Deep Purple (who they are touring with to support this album), Led Zeppelin, etc. If you didn’t know this was Europe, you’d think you really were listening to a new Deep Purple album at times. Joey Tempest sounds like Ian Gillan at times. The song “GTO” is total Deep Purple worship and the band fully admits they had Deep Purple in mind when they wrote it.

You won’t find anything that sounds even remotely like “Cherokee”, “Rock the Night Away” or “Ninja” on this release, but the band did write what they claim to be a sequel (in terms of lyrics) to “The Final Countdown” in the form of “Pictures”, a beautiful melancholy ballad. “Kingdom United” might be my favorite song of the year by any band, but “Walk the Earth” and “The Siege” are great epic rockers as well.

As much as I liked War of Kings, with Walk the Earth I’ve found myself spinning it way more times than the band’s previous effort. Walk the Earth is full ofpowerful, timeless hard rock songs. Songs so good that it’s almost a shame because you know it’ll never get the respect or airplay that it deserves. Europe has no right to be this good, this legit, this authentic nearly 40 years into their career, but they are and it’s amazing.

What do you get when you put Danger Danger’s Ted Poley and Trixter’s Steve Brown together? You get Tokyo Motor Fist. If you’re a fan of Danger Danger and Trixter, there’s plenty to enjoy here. A familiar and polished sounding effort, Tokyo Motor Fist offers a brand of melodic hard rock tunes that would sound at home in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

“Put Me to Shame” is probably the best song of 2017, but the rest of the album doesn’t quite reach the heights of that song. Don’t get me wrong — this is a good listen in a background noise kind of way, and there’s nothing “bad” here, but very few stand out tracks.

Musically, the album is what you’d expect from members of Danger Danger and Trixter. Almost every song here you could pass off as the work of either band. Longtime and hardcore Danger Danger and Trixter fans may get more mileage out of this one than I did as I’m only a casual fan of those bands.